In September, 2017, Ecobank laid off scores of its contract staff and shut down or merged 10 branches in Ghana. The move was part of a digital migration strategy that meant they needed fewer human interaction to offer the same services to their clients. With a new mobile app and the Masterpass QR, Ecobank’s aim was to use technology to provide the same services that humans used to provide.

The reason behind the adoption of Artificial Intelligence is always the same in situations like this: boost productivity and reduce costs. The rationale for adopting tech has always been that it reduces contact hours and costs, thereby reducing the dollar per head involved in operations. Technology and other AI-inspired interventions also promise an improvement in operations. With improved efficiency, AI ensures higher profits for businesses even if it means humans suffer the collateral impact.

In Africa more than anywhere, the possibilities of AI-inspired workplaces are exciting as they are troubling. For one, Africa still lags behind when it comes to investment in machine learning and robotics adoption. More university students are still enrolled in rote learning courses with only a handful involving the key areas of STEM. But the continent is not so dark and gloomy.

The Machines Are Here

Businesses and governments are already employing artificial intelligence to power solutions on the continent. In 2016, Zipline signed a deal with Rwanda to provide critical medicine and blood units to hinterlands and areas with poor road networks. The intervention has reduced the time it takes to deliver blood to rural hospitals from 4 hours to a quarter of an hour. Nigeria’s Aajoh in beta, uses AI to provide remote medical diagnosis and information on where to get medication.

In Ghana, Sesi Technologies is using affordable tech to help farmers increase productivity and minimize losses. GrainMate, their flagship product, helps monitor moisture content in grains to boost productivity. Sesi is just one of many agritech businesses using AI to impact the agric value chain in the country.

Precision farming is cutting down on waste by carefully distributing inputs as and when they are needed. IBM’s EZ farm, for example, uses the IBM Cloud to help farmers monitor key indicators on farms far away from city centres.

Also, improvement in mobile infrastructure has brought micro banking to the footstep of the hitherto under-served population. Mobile money transactions have already surpassed GHS 1 billion in Ghana alone. In West Africa, there are 13 times more active mobile money agents than the total number of bank branches and ATMs. Beyond providing money transfer services, mobile money technology has helped to extend pension, insurance, and retail services to Africa’s population. Platforms like Esoko and AgroTrade are bringing buyers and farmers closer than before.

For households and end-users, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) promises consumer surplus in cheaper products as well as more efficient service delivery which cut down time costs. It’s therefore good news to hear Google is establishing an artificial intelligence research centre in Accra, Ghana.

Losing Jobs

The fear of the robot invasion is real and justified enough. Forty-one percent of all work activities in South Africa are susceptible to automation, the World Economic Forum said in 2017. In Ethiopia and Nigeria, the figures are 44 and 46 percent respectively, while 52 percent applies to Kenya. Perhaps the simplest examples of AI taking human jobs are the chatbots integrated into many websites. Where once humans manned customer service lines, AI-powered responses are providing similar services to an appreciative customer base.

Robots taking jobs is not just an African phenomenon. In China, automated guided vehicles (AGV) do 70% of the work in Alibaba warehouses. There are 74 robot units to 10,000 employees in manufacturing globally, representing a 12 percent increase from the 2015 figure.

The economic rationale for citing manufacturing firms in Asia and Africa was that the continent had raw materials and an abundance of cheap human labour. With the strides enjoyed in machine learning and robotics engineering, however, the average cost of adoption is falling to a level that could put unskilled labour in Africa out of work. Firms in America and Europe would now be able to produce the same products in the west at a lower price than they do in Africa and the east. Between 2010 and 2015, researchers found that 250,000 jobs were reshored to the United States due to falling capital costs there. The data indicates that approximately 126 Africans lose their jobs for every company that returns to America.

And so the dangers of AI and the 4IR are not just with robots taking jobs in Africa. Rather, the 4IR is leading to a relocation of services and jobs to the countries that invest in robotics and AI.

AfDB in 2017, reported that the youth were twice at risk of unemployment as adults in many African countries. Part of the reason for this is the low pace of job creation to match the number of graduates churned by the continent’s tertiary schools. Only 3 million jobs are created to meet the needs of 10-12 million fresh graduates coming out of universities yearly. With young men and women making up half the African population, the implications of large scale unemployment are dire.

What Can Africans Do?

The AI invasion is not a myth. People are going to lose their jobs, and scores of job descriptions will be wiped away by a snippet of code. With improved internet access, artificial intelligence will take over the classrooms. Machines will produce more of what we consume than we can imagine. That notwithstanding, Africa still has the potential of scaling up to meet the challenge through key interventions.

Regulations

Regulation is an important intervention to retool the African labour force. Creating thought-out frameworks will help industries develop around key tech spaces that are springing up. For example: is Uber a transport company or an ICT firm? The answer to this will determine the regulations Uber will have to abide by, hence spell out the taxes and competitions the ride-hailing firm will have to face. A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report showed that regulations increased the creation of new firms from 700 a year to 3000 a year in Rwanda.

Regulations also provide safe environments within which certain innovations can be created and used. Drone operation, for example, demands explicit legislation to keep citizens safe in order to not interfere with the activities of the aviation industry. Also, laws about data protection should be streamlined in order to deter hackers and malware operators from taking advantage of users through poorly developed mobile applications. Analogous to protecting user data is protecting intellectual property.

Entrepreneurship and STEM Education

Africa’s youthful population will reach one billion by 2050, reports say. A policy shift that puts these young men and women in focus will mean Africa has a quarter of the world’s skilled labour by then. If one skilled employee can work smarter, then a billion of them will do it a billion times smarter. The economic boom is beyond imagining, but only when steps are taken to provide the opportunities that increase job elasticity among the youth; unless the youth are able to move easily in response to market changes, they will not be able to take advantage of changing market conditions. The consequence, as is with the potential overtake by robots, is low income, unemployment, and the plague that follows such situations.

Policies geared at promoting entrepreneurship and productivity can provide the needed impetus to improve living standards in Africa. 41 percent of all firms in Tanzania identify a lack of skilled labour as a major problem for their business according to the World Economic Forum. In Kenya, the number is 30 percent. South African and Nigerian figures stand at 9 percent 6 percent respectively.

Only 2% of the continent’s university-age population are involved in STEM education. This is where the transformation is happening. STEM scientists are driving the transformation agenda. If Africa isn’t producing enough change-makers, then Africa will be left behind. AI developments in the western world will make Africa’s cheap labour force exponentially more expensive. Africans need to invest in science and research to get ahead of the AI curve or risk being left behind.

Infrastructure

Developments in infrastructure will generate new ventures that marry formal possibilities to the informal sectors. Mobile banking, for example, is already providing financial services to informal market women. The same is happening with livestock farmers connected to startups like CowTribe. To go further, there has to be more information access to both sides of the economy to increase collaboration in order to take advantage of the growing tech advancements.

Further development in telecom infrastructure will go a long way to connect people and places in Africa with reliable internet services that can power modern technology systems. It is not just about having access to Google and Facebook. The internet provides vast amounts of learning resources to accelerate skill absorption. The internet also makes it easy to form partnerships and create opportunities for peoples from different geographic locations. With poor internet access, many in Africa will be left behind as the world leaps into 5G.

For the next generation of tech advancements to make any positive impacts, policies should be geared at encouraging its adoption in areas where majority of the population is already located. AI-driven agricultural revolution, for example, has the potential of making the continent self sufficient in key food products. It will provide jobs and reduce instances of famine that the continent has suffered in the past decades.  Agribusinesses will flourish when raw materials are assured, and the average smallholder will be assured of a market for his products and regular income.

The Smart Creative?

Perhaps, it is not a good idea to goad artificial intelligence that much. However, if there is anything that the robots will have a hard time replacing, it is the ability of the African to create pieces of art based on generational experiences. Satires as well as music and painting are not endeavours that pieces of code can replicate perfectly. Even where that is possible, artificial intelligence will likely produce predictable and boring pieces barely worth the time and effort used in creating them. If you are a painter, musician, dancer, or work in sectors that require creative dexterity, the future of your kind of work is safer.

Health services are another area where machine learning may not be able to boot humans out. Though a lot of diagnoses are being done with the help of AI, the level of human intervention needed is too critical to delegate to a robot. It might be realistic to expect a self-driving aircraft in the future, but to have a gilded robot perform open heart surgery? Thanks but no thanks. At least, not just yet.

One way to stay relevant is to learn the skills that create the robots. Coding and research in robotics is a rewarding field that will continue to grow. As more and more organisations adopt AI in their businesses, firms will need a greater supply of creative and programming skills and all things AI to make their businesses run more smoothly. Data science and analytics will also continue to be in high demand. This digital age is churning out enormous volumes of data with unimaginable potential inherent in it. The benefits will go to those who know what to do with it.

If your work involves mundane repetitive tasks that can be done without much thought, you need to start rethinking your career to go to the next level; not necessarily change it. Ask yourself, if your job were to be automated today, what can you do with the outcome of the automation in combination with your knowledge and skills? Then ask yourself what new skills you need to effectively perform that function in keeping with current trends. And finally, go and acquire those skills.

An important way to stay competitive even when robotics engineering reaches its zenith is to keep learning new skills. Machines replaced human labour on the farms when tractors were commercialised. Trucks made it easier to transport cargo. Even then, man still survived by complementing the efforts of these machines. Advances in tech always open up new industries and create new products. Being able to move between jobs by learning key skills will keep you in demand no matter the market conditions.

If anything, technological advancement make us better. AI-powered education will be able to detect a person’s shortcomings and map out the best way to learn a new skill. AI will better monitor our progress and suggest better ways to make us more efficient at work.

Truth is the world will not survive with humans out of work. Robots don’t pay rent or taxes. They don’t buy luxury vehicles or spend time on social platforms. And there is no replacement for creative thinking. So long as businesses need to make money, people will find jobs.